Cellular phone bills are confusing and difficult to manage. Federal Communications Commission statistics from the fourth quarter of 2001 show 1,323 of 2,423 complaints relating to wireless service were about billing. This illustrates obvious confusion and dissatisfaction with the billing process. Businesses are especially susceptible to extraordinary costs due to the variable nature of the rate plans and usage; it is one of the few costs that is billed by the minute and therefore can significantly change by an hour or two of extra usage. Typically, subscribers do not know how to read their communications bill, and because of this, subscribers are often being billed incorrectly. This frequently results in significantly higher bills than necessary and mismatched applications of technology.
According to the Strategis group, “Wireless voice service has reached a commodity status, whereby all carriers across the United States offer voice minutes to subscribers at very competitive rates” (US cellular/PCS marketplace: outlook and forecasts, 2001). This translates to three important factors in the wireless market today: 1. Because the carriers are marketing based on commodity pricing, they are more focused on the consumer market and not the business market. 2. Because the commodity prices continue to fall, there are not only decreasing margins on rate plans, but also are offering a greater number of rate plans. Therefore, as their own margins decrease, carriers are not rewarded to service these customers proactively, nor are they rewarded to make the bills correct. 3. Because the commodity structure now focuses on price, carriers gain subscriber adds by lowering rate plans. These prices are falling an average of 5% per year.
Presently, any subscriber can manage his or her own wireless bill; however, this requires them to have:
1. Billing knowledge to insure they can correctly read a bill to determine its format and what is it telling the user.
2. Wireless knowledge to confirm the rate plans that are supposed to be billed are in fact the ones that are being billed and the details of the plan (minutes, coverage areas, features etc) are equivalent to what their plan offers.
3. The format to simplify the process and enable the user to identify comparisons to a baseline.
4. Wireless carrier knowledge to negotiate through the carrier end of the billing cycle to get credits posted. Although the layperson may be able to have some of these processes in place, they probably do not have all and thus cannot implement the same process as the discussed method.
In addition, some of the carriers are offering services to help subscribers onto a better rate plan if the subscriber initiates a call to a national customer service number and asks for a better rate plan. Further, some of the national account managers for carriers will sometimes meet with larger subscribers to go over new options. However, the options suggested usually are changes that reflect a financial benefit to the carrier and require action to be taken by the end user. This inquiry also takes the end user's time and also requires that the user will have some level of wireless expertise on which to make a decision.
Also, all billing systems that have been created are in the best interest of the carriers to make their billing easier to distribute to end users. The typical “bill management” searches reveal creations or enhancements to systems that are used by the carrier. Although the message being conveyed is a rate plan analysis, most information provided here is not using a baseline for comparison, nor does it have the best interest of the end user in mind.